10 Must Have Marketing Tools To Add In Small Business Growth Strategies!

12 May 2022

Marketing is an essential part of business growth because people will buy your service only when they know about your existence. And people will know about you only when you promote your business on various platforms where they are looking for your product or services. Therefore, marketing tools play an essential role in spreading brand awareness.

Digitization has provided an equal platform for every large and small business; all you need is the right knowledge and skills to use marketing tools to grow your business.

What are Marketing Tools?

Marketing tools are techniques, strategies, and materials used by marketing specialists of brands to create, enhance, and promote their products and services in order to expand their visibility. They are used for market research, generating leads, data analysis, content creation, SEO, and other categories of marketing.

To increase productivity and make marketing time cost-efficient, there are various marketing tools in the form of software that helps you with various activities related to marketing.

Here We Have Listed Ten Must-Have Marketing Tools:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

HubSpot CRM
Zendesk

Social Media Tools

Buzzsumo
Buffer

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools

SEMrush
Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension

Content Creation and Design Tools

Canva
Adobe Spark

Lead Generation Tools

Unbounce
Instapage

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

These tools let you interact with your customers through data analysis of gathered information. They compile data from various communication channels such as the company’s websites, calls, emails, live chats, and other marketing materials posted on social media platforms. The data analysis helps a business know about customer behavior, their needs, and demands to provide them better services, which is an integral part of growing a business as they help to form business growth strategies to retain customers and drive sales.

1. HubSpot CRM: being free, every small business can have access to this incredible free tool. The tool saves a lot of time for the sales team as it gives you complete visibility of your entire sales pipeline on a clean and visual dashboard. It lets you connect to the prospects through free meeting scheduling, live chat, email templates, click-to-call functionality, and more.

2. Zendesk: it is an easy-to-love sales tool that will boost the productivity of your sales team, make data-driven decisions, and deliver enhanced customer experiences. Additionally, you can build and manage a pipeline that aligns with your business.

Social Media Tools:

social media helps to expand enormously, as most of the world’s population is an active member of at least one social media platform where you can connect to them on a personal level. Therefore, it is highly important to manage what you post and how your followers respond to your content. Social media tools help you schedule your posts and get the right analytics from the posts, even from the channels where it can be hard to get the information.

3. Buzzsumo: The tool explores premium content that can help you get more likes, links, and shares. It analyses a vast amount of data to enhance your social media marketing strategies. Moreover, it helps you find influencers who can be an asset to your campaign. Another most important feature of the tool is that it tracks comments and trends to make a real-time connection with your audience.

4. Buffer: it is one of the most affordable and intuitive tools to manage your social media activity. It analyzes the data, helps your plan and schedule your posts, filters out important comments, and responds quickly to them. Additionally, it lets you track down your activity and analyze your progress to make better strategies.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

SEO is an integral part of digital marketing, as only an optimized website of content is visible on the search engines such as Google, which are the primary gateways for customers to enter a conversation with your brand. Therefore, you need SEO tools to manage and plan various SEO-related tasks such as keyword research, content optimization, or checking your current page ranking.

5. SEMrush: It is an award-winning tool used worldwide as a single platform to do SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing. Specifically for SEO, it uncovers millions of local, and national keywords, analyzes any domain’s backlinking profile, tracks your SERP position on a daily basis, and runs technical SEO audits.

6. Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension: this add-on browser is easy to install and is compatible with both Chrome and Firefox. The extension shows monthly search volume, CPC, and competition data of keywords on multiple websites. Therefore, it will save you time that you can utilize to strengthen your business growth strategies.

Content Creation and Design Tools:

Content such as social images, logos, blog posts, or eBooks is the most influential way to attract people’s attention to your brand. And there are many tools to create them.

7. Canva: the tool lets you create professional designs with premium features such as brand kit and background remover. It lets you can plan, create, and edit the content on your own or with your team. Additionally, the Built-in comments feature helps you communicate, work, and resolve suggestions in real-time. Therefore, with Canva, you can create world-class designs and share them with the world in just a few clicks.

8. Adobe Spark: it is a collection of three web/mobile apps, namely Spark Page, Spark Post, and Spark Video, to allow the creation of social graphics, flyers, logos webpages, videos in various themes, and other types of content in no time. It has thousands of templates that any beginner can use to create effective content.

Lead Generation Tools:

To expand your business, you need to generate leads, and it is the most challenging part of marketing. Lead generation tools will help you make the lead generation process easy and simple as their automated features increase the process of conversion.

9. Unbounce: with this tool, you can launch overlays on top of any web page that has a call-to-action feature. You can customize the triggers and targeting rules to choose who sees the offers and when. This feature helps to make your brand reach the relevant audience whose chances of conversion are maximum. Additionally, you can personalize your overlays by making your copy adaptable to what your audience searches for.

10. Instapage: the tool lets you create and optimize relevantly, on-brand, mobile-responsive post-click landing pages and experiences without the help of a developer. It helps to increase visitor engagement and conversion with unique landing page experiences for every ad and targeted audience.

The main motive behind using these tools is to enhance the productivity of your sales department. You can make the best use of these marketing tools by hiring an expert who knows them in and out to save your time by focusing on your product and services and letting them do the rest of the job.

The best part about these marketing tools is that they are affordable, and some of them even offer free trials and templates. So, even if you are short on funds, you can still make use of these marketing tools to grow your small business.

Author Bio:

Joe Martin is a long-time contributor in the tech industry as a leader at Adobe, CMO of CloudApp, and SVP at Scorpion. With his business and marketing degress from Utah and Stanford and his work in tsech he brings a unique balance of strategy and execution to help businesses large and small grow.

Arnab

Arnab is a professional blogger, having an enormous interest in writing blogs and other jones of calligraphies. In terms of his professional commitments, He carries out sharing sentient blogs.

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5 Creative Ways to Improve Lead Quality with Multi-Step forms

A majority of companies who execute lead generation often complain about the quality of leads that they get from lead generation forms. Problems range from not getting enough people to type in the leads to people getting confused about the leads. While Landing Page forms that help in lead generation are still one of the best ways to improve sales and queries, optimization of the same remains a major concern. In this article, we help companies devise the best lead generation form. We also look at why digital marketing experts prefer certain key steps when creating multi-step forms. Therefore, if you are a company, or a digital marketing expert looking to maximize the potential for lead generation, you should pay attention to this article. Lead Generation through Multi-Level Forms: Why is it important? Every digital business has to complete a cycle, which eventually culminates in the last goal- generating sales and revenues. Brands try to use SEO, Social Media Marketing, Google AdWords and other marketing strategies to reach their target audience. A brand wants people to be directed by using the above-mentioned strategies to their website or landing page. The multi-level form is the final step of getting the information and reaching out to the customer to satisfy his query. You can have multi-step forms on social media platforms, but getting the customer to a brand’s website or landing page is still the desired goal. This not only helps in keeping, increasing, and maintaining a database, it also adds to the health of the website. Even though there are many other strategies and ways, which are being tried out by brands, yet the multi-step forms for lead generation continues to be a digital marketing favorite. 5 creative ways to improve lead quality with multi-step forms: The List 1. Always place Multi-Level forms above the Fold- Statistics show that forms or CTAs placed above the fold generate over 200% more results than the ones, which are placed somewhere else on the page. In other words, above the fold section on a page is considered a prime real estate in digital marketing terms. The aim should always be to capture the attention of the viewer or user as soon as possible. 2. The Call-To-Action should always be simple and direct- Brands and agencies tend to cramp too many CTAs in one simple form. The aim is to make it as clear as possible to the target audiences. By leaving, no stone unturned when it comes to removing confusion, brands can encourage more people to sign up for the forms. Have one clear and direct CTA is a landing page best practice. 3. Be honest and disclose the Privacy Concerns- Every user who is visiting a digital platform wants all their privacy concerns should be respected at all times. Nobody wants to be bombarded with promotional material all the time. Your multi-step form should always be honest in disclosing what the user is getting into. Factors like unsubscribe at any time, or a link to how their data is going to be used should have a link. 4. Keep the messaging short and sweet on the multi-level forms- Have you ever come across forms, which have ten tabs and long text boxes? Do you know what their success rate is? The answer is very poor! Do not make your target audience work extra. Give them the offer, and ask them to fill as few tabs and sections as possible. This is just digital behavior. If some information is not required for, do not place it on the form. 5. Focus on the Design, Colours and Image elements- Capturing attention is something, which most landing pages and multi-level aim for. This means that in addition to the messaging, it is important to focus on the design elements of the multi-level form. Colors, images, text box size, and the entire user experience needs to be factored in when creating the form. The better the design, the better will be the lead generation. Conclusion If you are following the five points mentioned above when creating the landing page, you can rest assured that you will improve your digital marketing performance. Can you think of some other ways to help and improve the health of your multi-level form? Let us know your suggestions in the comments section below. Read Also: 5 Types of Digital Marketing 5 Unusual Social Media Tips That No One Will Know About 5 Traditional Marketing Techniques That Still Work

Which Targeting Option is Best for Influencing Consideration?

Question: Which targeting option is best for influencing consideration? Remarketing Demographics Custom Intent Custom Affinity Correct Answer: Custom Intent Detailed Answer Of “Which Targeting Option Is Best For Influencing Consideration?” The answer to your question “Which targeting option is best for influencing consideration?” is Custom Intent. Custom Intent is the best targeting option for influencing consideration because it helps you to reach your ideal audience by entering apps, URLs, and relevant keywords. According to the reports, many digital campaigns are not able to reach their target audience. To eliminate this problem, Google launches Custom Intent audiences. This program enables digital marketers to create audiences based on online behavior and relevant keywords. Besides, you can set up this in your Video, Gmail, Discovery, and Display campaigns by adding particular apps, URLs, and keywords, related to your goods and services. What are Custom Intent Audiences? Now, you might be confused about custom intent audiences. No need to worry! I am going to explain in detail Google’s custom intent and its benefits in the long run. Custom Intent audiences is a Google product that enables marketers to target individuals presently researching particular solutions, products, and topics on the web by making use of Youtube or display video campaigns. Best Benefits of Custom Intent Audiences Yes, there are various benefits of custom intent audiences as it lowers the waste in ad budgets and reduces the stream of irrelevant online ad experiences by targeting high-quality prospects. Now, let’s discuss some powerful benefits of Google’s custom intent audiences. 1. Custom Intent Audience Targeting is Cheaper: Custom Intent audience campaigns reduce the rate of CPC (Cost Per Click) to a great extent while targeting the same high intent searchers. So, the drawback of the high intent search keywords i.e., high CPC eliminates by Custom Intent Audience. This is regarded as the best benefit of targeting options for influencing consideration. 2. Custom Intent Reduce Waste in Ad Spend Another benefit of the custom intent audience is that it reduces waste in ad spending. This gives you an opportunity to target only the most likely customers by making use of suitable offers. Moreover, this ad is only shown to a specific group of audiences who are interested in a particular topic related to your goods and services. This means that there are less wasted impressions when firms target unspecific niches or have too wide of a target audience. 3. Eliminates Targeting Expenses Eliminates targeting expenses is another benefit of using custom intent audiences. As already discussed above that search ad comes with a high CPC and the targeting prospects of both are nearly the same. Besides, responsive display ads featured in Custom intent campaigns get more click-through rates, impressions, and clicks at a lower cost. 4. Become a Thought Leader On A Given Topic Do you want to make your business a thought leader in your particular domain? If yes, then make the right use of custom intent audiences! You can analyze the URLs that are ranking on the first page of Google and make use of those in order to rank on the top pages of the search engine result page. Keep in mind, digital display ads with custom intent can reach the same result faster with a higher return on investment. 5. Tap Into Competitor’s Targeting Data & Advertise To Their Customers Custom intent audiences enable you to perform competitive research to gain insights into the keywords that bring conversions to your competitor’s websites. This way you can easily collect the data and use it for your own campaigns to target your prospect customers and increase conversion rates to a great extent. How To Create Custom Intent Audiences? To create custom intent audiences, you need to consider some factors that are listed below: i). Competitor’s pages ii). Competitor’s keywords iii). Search volume iv). Main competitors v). In-market keywords. Now, the proper steps to custom intent for your business, follow the below-listed tips step by step: Sign in to your Google Ads Account Click on “Display Campaigns” Pick one active campaign and click “Audiences” Then, select an ad group and click the plus icon Click on the pencil icon under the browser tab Select the blue plus icon and create a name for your custom intent Now, check the potential reach of your campaign under ‘Audience size’ The Final Verdict Custom Intent is the answer to your question “Which Targeting Option is Best for Influencing Consideration?” The above-described information explains the reasons why custom intent audiences can be used for targeting purposes and what are the benefits of the same. You May Read Also: Which Marketing Mix Element Deals Specifically With Retailing And Marketing Channel Management? Essentials For Digital Marketing How we could be able to get benefits from the outdoor marketing

3 Easy Ways to Grow Your Email List

The email marketing industry is expanding and there is growing competition between brands: they all want to get people’s attention. Sometimes, acquiring more subscribers seems hard. If you are looking to grow your email list, we have three easy ways maybe you never thought of. Whether you offer a service, product or content is the product, use these tips to add more subscribers to your database and become more successful at email marketing. Why you should grow your email list There are good reasons to build your email database. It can be an instantaneous way to reach the people who want to hear from you. Also, it’s cheaper than advertising or mass mailings. Every marketer wants a large email list which is understandable. In general, the more people you reach, the better results and this has never been more true than with emails. The typical ROI for email is $42 for every $1 spent. However, before you try any email list growth strategy, remember it’s not always about the numbers. You want true engagement and a long-term relationship with your audience. To build that, focus on adding real subscribers to your list – people who genuinely want to connect with your brand. How do you do that? Let’s get into three ways to grow your email list without much effort. Is it easy for someone to sign up? Many organizations and freelancers have only one sign-up form and you’d be surprised how much you have to search the website to find that form. So, the first tip: make your email sign-up visible and easy to find. For instance, you could place it at the top of your website and not buried down by the copyright notice. Also, avoid making the text so small that someone can’t read it. Instead, let your signup form be the first thing people see when they land on your platform. Are you promoting your email list on your social media channels? Maybe you’ve been working hard to gain followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. There’s certainly inherent value in this, but a lot of marketers make the mistake of not cross-promoting channels. Who’s to say that someone can’t follow you on Facebook and be a subscriber to your email list? Just remember that people will frequently leave social media channels for one reason or another. You don’t want them forgetting about your brand and what you offer, so do your best to get them on your list. Post periodically on social media and invite people to subscribe to your emails. Your newsletters’ content should have real value and be unique from your website or social media content. This is a great incentive to gain an email audience. Plus, you can think outside the box to gain new followers. Maybe you can run a contest or offer a freebie, such as an e-book to anyone who signs up – whatever you think would entice your audience. Do you include an email subscribe button in every email you send? Word of mouth is the best marketing. If someone on your list really likes your email and forwards it on to a friend, they need an easy way to subscribe. A “subscribe” button makes it simple by saving them the trouble of looking you up, going to your website, and finding your form. So, at the end of every email you send, include a call-to-action. It could be as simple as: “Did you get this email from a friend? Get yours” + “Subscribe” button. The more convenient you make it for people to subscribe, the faster your email list will grow! Also, it doesn’t hurt to encourage your subscribers to forward your email. Some of them will do that and that’s a great way to grow your audience. It’s not all about numbers Now that we’ve gone over a few easy ways to grow your email list, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not all about numbers. There is another aspect to growing your campaign: email list quality. Gathering lots of subscribers is great for email marketing, but you have to make sure those subscribers are real. You may be asking, “Well, why wouldn’t they be?” In the world of email marketing, there are quite a few types of emails that degrade your sender reputation. A sender reputation is a score that every email sender has. It’s the rating Internet Service Providers use to determine your behavior as an email sender. Some of the factors that influence your sender score are: your bounce rate your overall engagement: open and click-through rates are vital metrics the number of spam complaints and unsubscribes you get Bad email addresses you could have in your list All these factors are in direct connection with the quality of your email list. Unfortunately, every organization or marketer will acquire some bad email addresses over time. Some of the most damaging yet prevalent ones include: Fake email addresses: for a number of reasons, people sometimes provide fake email addresses. Sometimes they just want to take advantage of a freebie and have no intention of being a subscriber. Abuse emails: some people are malicious and others just careless. Abuse email owners have a habit of marking emails as spam, even those they signed up for. You don’t want these people on your list because they will hurt your sender reputation. Temporary email addresses: would you believe there are websites that exist for the sole purpose of generating temporary emails? These email addresses are sometimes called disposable because the person uses them for a day or two and never again. Then, they only cause your bounce rate to go up. On top of these, we can’t forget there’s always natural decay of the list. People simply change email addresses. Some people use their school or work email and they graduate or quit. You must get those email addresses off of your list. Use an email verifier to keep your database clean Thankfully, there is a healthy way to grow and maintain your list. The first thing is to never buy or trade email addresses to add to your list. First of all, it’s illegal to email people without their consent. Furthermore, a purchased list isn’t likely to result in anything positive and most likely the people you add will mark you as spam. The simplest way to keep your list healthy is to: The first clean it in bulk using an email verifier then, install an email verification API on your sign-up forms. Clean your list in bulk If you already have a substantial number of contacts in your list, but are not sure about their validity, run your list through a bulk email verifier. The process is simple and doesn’t take much time: you upload your list into the system and get it back clean within hours or even minutes. Install an email verification API This simple piece of software checks every new email address in real-time. It grants permission to good emailers and keeps out any of the problematic accounts mentioned above. Once your list is clean, consider adding the API to all your sign-up forms to ensure it stays in good shape. The sky’s the limit You would be surprised what a difference email marketing makes. It’s the most personal way to reach people and is an incredible tool to communicate the story of your brand and service. Using careful planning, creativity and email verification tools you are on the right path to growing your email list and getting good results. Read Also: How to Integrate Email Marketing With SEO Why Email Marketing is the BEST Digital Marketing Outreach in Singapore

10 Must Have Marketing Tools To Add In Small Business Growth Strategies!

What are Marketing Tools?

Here We Have Listed Ten Must-Have Marketing Tools: